How strange it must have seemed to the authors of Oona out of Order and the Midnight Library that their books had so many unusual similarities. …

I remember being given Sea Monkeys as a Christmas present when I was a child. The package showed an amazing aquatic world inhabited by otherworldly creatures that looked like little mermaids. There was a papa sea monkey, a mama sea monkey, and a pair of child sea monkies. If I…

J.K. Rowling’s first novel was rejected twenty-two times, but this doesn’t help you understand the present-day publishing climate. Back in the mid-1990s, Rowling sent her submissions to literary agents as hardcopy and you would need to multiply twenty-two by at least a factor of four to get a reasonable comparison…

I recently read a story about how the fastest girl in America was broken down by a training regimen designed by idiots and it reminded me of my university experience. When I was in university, there was a daily race to complete problem sets and those who ‘worked together’…

Why do we find truth beautiful? This question gets to the heart of how people give meaning to their lives. We see a complex world and try to reduce it to simple, symmetrical, geometrical principles and then we call those principles beautiful. This is sort of like self-praise if you…

[a tongue in cheek look at physics] “A dragon roared into the coldness of space and the stars are condensation from his breath.” “No, stars aren’t like condensation, they are like a diffraction pattern from x-rays shining through a crystal.” “No. That is stupid. There was a little boy who…

[trigger warning: this is about traumatic medical treatments] The first Naomi wrote Shock Doctrine, a book that showed how US shock and awe military strategy was influenced by CIA brainwashing studies from the 1960s. Even though the research showed that shock therapy brainwashing techniques merely destroyed people, the belief that…

If you are looking for real-life magic, check out a chain fountain. When a lightweight chain or string of beads falls out of a jar, the chain begins to lift up into the air, seemingly defying gravity. How does this sorcery work? Surely the ancients had a satisfying explanation for…

I am going to explain how gravity is related to the quantum uncertainty principle, but to motivate this explanation, I first need to provide some historical background. In 300 BC, young Archimedes learned in school that the surface area of a sphere is